🐛 bug art nyc 🐛
Conceptual Artist and Humanitarian. Intimate Partner Violence Advocate and Activist. Forging awareness and accountability while shining 💡 on Coercive Control and Narcissistic Abuse throughout our lives, in our home, the workplace, and our government. There is no peace without liberation.
Bug Art NYC shines light on Domestic Violence and Coercive Control while integrating today’s global issues from social change, climate change, and public health . With the leaf artworks, conceptual artist, activist, advocate and BugArtNYC founder, Gwendolyn C Skaggs , takes her art making and personal experience to a universal level while heeding the Scientists' warning to humanity on insect extinctions and political catastrophes. SILENCE IS VIOLENCE, produced by hornworms, combines the artist’s understanding of balancing opposing forces with her knowing to look deeper into causes that disrupt and destroy the path to a just life for all sentient beings, holding oppressive systems and perpetrators accountable.
SILENCE IS VIOLENCE
From Femicide to Genocide
From femicide to genocide, violence against targeted groups is sustained not only through acts of brutality but through silence, denial, and the normalization of oppression. While genocide and femicide are distinct forms of violence, both emerge from systems that dehumanize, devalue, and render certain lives expendable. They are connected by patterns of domination, discrimination, and the abuse of power. Oppression anywhere is oppression everywhere.
Silence Is Violence brings these connections into dialogue through a single leaf transformed into a public act of witness. Created with hornworms guided by a hand-cut template, the work combines environmental awareness with social justice, linking violence against people with the exploitation, domination, and destruction of the natural world. The leaf serves as both a biological object and a political surface upon which questions of power, accountability, coexistence, and survival are made visible.
BugArtNYC rejects the imposition of human constructs such as "insect talent" onto nonhuman life. Doing so reflects the assumptions of human supremacy by interpreting nature through human values rather than recognizing it on its own terms. Instead, the work exposes the systems that normalize violence and challenges the silence that allows them to persist.
The hornworms are not presented as the artists. They possess neither intention nor symbolic understanding. They simply eat according to instinct, consuming only what the template allows. The artwork emerges through the intersection of natural behavior and artistic intention. Interpreting their behavior through human concepts such as talent, creativity, genius, or authorship imposes human values onto nonhuman life, obscures the actual relationships at work, and reflects the assumptions of human supremacy, measuring nature according to human desires rather than recognizing it on its own terms. Human supremacy does not end with placing humans above other species; it also begins by assuming that human ways of thinking are the measure of all life.
The insects are not the subject of the work but the living medium through which broader questions of oppression, power, accountability, coexistence, and survival become visible. The message carried by the leaf is neither decorative nor sentimental. It embodies the voices of those who have been silenced, disbelieved, erased, or forgotten. It speaks to survivors of coercive control and violence against women, to victims of femicide and genocide, and to all whose lives have been diminished by systems that depend upon silence to survive.
BugArtNYC is an interdisciplinary art project that examines systems of oppression through the intersection of environmental awareness and social justice. While rooted in the lived realities of violence against women and coercive control, the work expands to examine broader structures of domination, including femicide, colonialism, genocide, human supremacy, environmental destruction, the public health consequences of oppression, and the devaluation of life.
Accountability begins with visibility. The telling of survivors' stories is essential to recovery, to dismantling stigma, and ultimately to prevention.
Silence protects perpetrators. Truth disrupts power. Accountability is prevention.